On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 8:25 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We live on a 4GB Linode. I don't have a full
handle on what we've got
on it - it's accreted in an ad-hoc fashion with some horrible bodges -
but there's several MediaWikis, only one of which (
rationalwiki.org)
has any appreciable traffic.
Is there any specific reason in regards to the multiple wiki setup?
(every little bit helps remember)
There's Lucene search, which is of course
huge in memory.
rationalwiki.org is running via libphp5, the other
wikis are via fastcgi (for no particular reason). The wikis have a
Standardizing configurations will probably be best in the long run,
for no other reason than standardization.
huge pile of extensions, e.g.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Special:Version , a lot of which are
local things.
I would really look at alot of them, and categorise them as "Must
haves" "Nice but not needed" and possibly "Why is this even
around?",
What are these "local" extensions? are their code bases public
anywhere?
Whenever an article hits Reddit,[1] the server suffers
under the load.
Typically it goes into swap and thrashes itself to death. If we're
really lucky the oom-killer comes out to play and shoots things
randomly (usually Apache, maybe Lucene). The fun bit: sometimes it
does this for no visible reason, just tips over into swap and promptly
stops talking to the world (my shell session still works slowly).
PoolCounter may help a tiny bit (One of TimS's extensions) which was
designed after the Obama incident bringing down en.wp, But there is
only so much you can do with limited resources and configuration
setups.
Per advice from here I've re-enabled keepalive,
setting it to 10
requests and 2 seconds. This does speed things up a bit for the users.
I haven't put a cache on the front as yet, still letting MediaWiki's
file cache do that. apc is running (99.8% cache hit rate, so that's
fine) and memcached (90% cache hit rate, upped it from 64MB to 128MB
and it's still about 90%).
So second thing we need to work out what our next stage of evolution
is (the 8GB Linode for $200/mo more? [2] or multiple servers?
Not really knowledgeable in this area but 200/month does seem a tad
expensive, Have you looked elsewhere apart from linnode?